Journalist Pod People Produced in London
June 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—MintPress News, a news site which previously reported on findings unearthed by Declassified UK about the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, explores another prominent export from that institute. In addition to spies and intelligence officers, the Department also produces a reliable supply of journalists.
The BBC is full of War Studies alumni.
“It’s an open secret that King’s College London Department of War Studies operates as the finishing school for Anglo-American securocrats. So it’s maybe not a surprise that graduates of its various military and intelligence courses also enter into a world of corporate journalism that exists to launder the messaging of these same ‘security’ agencies,”
says Declassified UK’s Matt Kennard. “It is, however, a real and present danger to democracy. The university imprimatur gives the department’s research the patina of independence while it works, in reality, as the unofficial research arm of the U.K. Ministry of Defense.”
MintPress spoke with Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus at Ohio’s Bowling Green State’s School of Media and Communication. He explained:
“Elite institutions in the past and doubtless still today have been major playgrounds for intelligence services. The history of the modern nation-state generally ... seems to suggest that national unity ... is regarded by elites as achievable only through careful management and often suppression or diversion of dissent. Far more resources are typically committed to this than many citizens, drilled in the propaganda of democracy, realize or care to concede.”
The supposedly independent investigative website Bellingcat, which plainly functions as a cut-out for intelligence agencies, is chock-full of King’s College alumni. Bellingcat’s Cameron Colquhoun, who worked for a decade at GCHQ, is an alum. Bellingcat’s senior investigator Nick Waters spent four years in the British Army before joining the Department of War Studies and Bellingcat. Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins, who denied for years that the National Endowment for Democracy (the CIA) was funding Bellingcat, had to admit this was true in 2017. In 2018, he joined the Department of War Studies. During this time he was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. So much for an independent investigative organization!
When Anglo-American intelligence agencies need to have “proof” of Russian misdeeds, they can launder it through Bellingcat.
This is hardly the only nexus between the intelligence state and supposedly independent research. In 2018, Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council to help oversee its 2.8 billion users. Earlier this year, Facebook hired former NATO press officer (and current Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council) Ben Nimmo as its chief of intelligence. A former Atlantic Council official also serves as Reddit’s Director of Policy. In 2019 it had been revealed that a senior Twitter executive for what it calls the Middle East region was actually an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th brigade, dedicated to psychological operations and online warfare.
Is the British Empire truly a thing of the past?
